Plaidophile: Another way top-posted replies suck

September 25, 2008

Another way top-posted replies suck (rant)

by fluffy at 11:31 AM

Not only does it make people stupid, but it makes people do stupid things to work around the problem of not having inline replies. Namely, if people want to reply to an email point-by-point, they end up doing silly things like changing the color of their text in the reply. If those point-by-point replies further require point-by-point responses, then you end up with a cavalcade of rainbow colors or font changes or the like which quickly becomes difficult to keep track of and becomes completely incomprehensible if someone does the unthinkable and changes the message formatting to plain text (or tries reading it on a text-only client, for that matter).

Reply markers exist for a reason, Microsoft.

(And yes I realize it's possible to turn them on in Outlook but it's not the default, and in particular our project manager doesn't set it up. Anyway, top-posted replies with per-line reply markers are doubly-stupid since now you've got a workaround for a workaround for something which was never a problem to begin with.)

Comments

#11321 HeuristicsInc 09/26/2008 10:33 am

Reply markers exist for a reason, Microsoft.

Yeah, this is really irritating me with Outlook too. It also replaces the > markers with some sort of stupid vertical line, which does not edit like a normal line would. Gah! Annoying Microsoft, deciding how we want things to look!!
-bill

#11322 fluffy

09/26/2008 10:40 am

Yeah. Mail.app also does the vertical-line thing but at least it's pretty intelligent about it, and it's also very easy to manage the quote level and you can always just switch back to raw message mode if things get too wacky.

#11324 dusk

10/02/2008 05:39 pm

fluffy:

Yeah. Mail.app also does the vertical-line thing but at least it's pretty intelligent about it, and it's also very easy to manage the quote level and you can always just switch back to raw message mode if things get too wacky.

Mail.app sometimes does some really weird things when you copy/paste quoted text, though. (The text changes back to the default color, and sometimes the line spacing gets screwed up.)

#11325 fluffy

10/02/2008 05:44 pm

I think the line spacing is an artifact of it trying to smartly reformat text which may not have been formatted particularly well to begin with. I mean I've run into that too but as far as issues go it's pretty minor. It's also pretty easy to switch into plaintext mode to massage things Just Right and then switch back into richtext mode (of course you lose all the special formatting but seriously, who cares about that to begin with?).

#11335 dusk

10/04/2008 04:50 pm

I write all my mail in plain-text mode, though. It seems like even just cut/pasting quoted text screws up some of the attributes.

Sometimes I wish someone'd write a good alternative mail client for OS X.

#11336 fluffy

10/04/2008 05:09 pm

elm/mutt + fetchmail?